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Inventing the Runway traces the evolution of the fashion presentation from the salons of Charles Frederick Worth to the CD-ROMs of Helmut Lang – with some of the greatest catwalk shows ever staged reimagined in Lightroom’s immersive gallery space in King’s Cross. Here, a closer look at five of the history-making collections projected on its 12-metre-high walls.
Alexander McQueen, Spring/Summer 1999
Staged in Gatliff Warehouse, a disused bus depot near Victoria station, Alexander McQueen’s 13th show was inspired by everything from the Arts & Crafts movement to the prosthetic limbs developed at Queen Mary’s Hospital during “The Great War”. Paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins opened the show wearing a pair of cherrywood legs that recalled the carvings of 17th-century sculptor Grinling Gibbons, while Shalom Harlow closed No 13 with a finale that still lingers in editors’ minds. Stepping onto a rotating disk in a white trapeze dress, the model stood in place as two robots brought in from a car manufacturing plant sprayed her aggressively with black and Brat-green paint. McQueen later claimed the performance had been inspired by Rebecca Horn’s “High Moon” (1991), and told ArtReview that it took a full week to programme the robots – and yet he refrained from giving Harlow any instructions about how to respond to them on the night. “Alexander and I didn’t have any conversation directly related to this particular piece and to creating this moment within this show,” she recalled ahead of the opening of the Savage Beauty retrospective. “I like to think that he wanted to interfere as little as possible and allow me to have the most genuine, spontaneous experience as possible.”
